The Lasting Significance of the Majors-Palakiko Case

In a 2004 documentary on the life and contributions of Hawai‘i labor lawyer Harriet Bouslog, another long-time labor activist, Ah Quon McElrath, observed, “I think what we can say is that Harriet Bouslog had a lot do with abolition of the death penalty in the state.”¹ She was referring to Bouslog’s work as the lead defense attorney in the Majors-Palakiko case, which is often connected to the elimination of executions in Hawai‘i in 1957; however, the case was not the primary factor. In 1948, James Majors and John Palakiko, two young Native Hawaiians, were convicted and sentenced to be hanged for the rape and murder of an elderly Haole woman, Therese Wilder, in what was called “the most sensational crime in Honolulu in 20 years.”² Legal and community appeals of their convictions, including an unsuccessful appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, eventually resulted in commutation of their death sentences to life in prison by the territorial governor in 1954. Three years later, the same governor, Republican Samuel Wilder King, signed the bill that ended capital punishment in the islands.

In the limited literature by academics and journalists on abolition of the death penalty in Hawai‘i, as noted above, the Majors-Palakiko case is often related to abolition but without discussing how the case led to it. This article provides a lengthier discussion of the case and its relation to the prohibition of executions, as well as a fuller explanation of how the latter transpired. I emphasize several race-related factors, including the multiracial coalition that developed to advocate commutation of Majors’s and Palakiko’s death sentences and later abolition, the greatly transformed racial setting of Hawai‘i, which resulted from labor organizing by the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU) after World War II, and the Democrats gaining control of the territorial legislature from the Haole-dominated Republicans for the first time in 1954. As is evident, as the dominant organizing principle of social relations in territorial Hawai‘i, race played a paramount role in all three factors and thus in ending capital punishment.

Majors-Palakiko Case and Racial Injustice

The significance of race, particularly racial injustice, is readily apparent in the highly publicized Majors-Palakiko or Wilder case, as it was initially called.³ On March 10, 1948, James Majors, aged twenty, and John Palakiko, nineteen, escaped from an Oahu Prison work gang in Chinatown and caught a city bus to the end of the line in Nu‘uanu Valley where they spent the night.⁴ They were both serving ten year sentences for burglary; Palakiko, a military prisoner, had been transferred from an army stockade after an escape attempt. Majors had a long record of arrests for burglary and escape since he was ten years old when he was placed in a Salvation Army facility for juvenile delinquents in 1937.⁵ The following year, he was taken into police custody after being found sleeping in A‘ala Park, six months after he had run away from the Salvation Army home.⁶ Palakiko’s parents divorced when he was young, and at age seventeen he was sentenced to three years’ probation for breaking into and burglarizing a home.⁷ He joined the army soon after, in 1946, and that same year was convicted, with three other youths, of robbing some sailors of their wallets and watches, for which he received fifty cents as his share and a ten-year sentence in the Schofield Barracks stockade. The sixty-eight-year-old victim, Therese Wilder, was originally from California and in 1917 married William Chauncey (“Chan”) Wilder, whose father started the Wilder Steamship Co. that later merged with the Inter-Island Steam Navigation Co.⁸ Her husband, who died in 1926 at age sixty, was connected to his father’s company for many years and was later a tax assessor in the territorial income tax division.

Figure 1.

James E. Majors, published September 1951. Courtesy of the Honolulu Star-Advertiser.

Figure 2.

John Palakiko, published September 1951. Courtesy of the Honolulu Star-Advertiser.

The next evening following their escape, Majors and Palakiko came across the large home of Wilder, who lived alone on her two-acre estate, on the upper Pali Road and broke in to get some food.⁹ After she accosted them in her house, Palakiko told the police he said to her, “Lady, we don’t want to hurt you,” and grabbed her arms.¹⁰ But when Wilder tried to run away, they beat her, breaking her jaw, then bound and gagged her, and her decomposing body was found four-and-a-half days later by her yard worker. After performing an autopsy on Wilder’s body, the Honolulu city and county coroner, Dr. Alvin Majoska, wrote in his report that she died from suffocation, probably as a result of a towel being tied around her mouth and nose.¹¹ Palakiko was arrested the next day after he and Majors tried to steal a car, but Majors was not caught until March 20 and immediately tried to kill himself by swallowing some iodine.

Majors and Palakiko were soon both charged with second-degree murder and first-degree burglary. According to the acting city prosecutor, John Desha, who was Native Hawaiian, based on the available evidence, including separate “confessions” by the accused, those were the “best charges” they could be indicted for, and the case was considered closed on March 25 because of their admissions of guilt.¹² Desha added that every previous first-degree murder case in the territory had evidence of premeditation, and no such evidence was apparent in Wilder’s homicide, although he said the prosecutor’s office would continue to determine if a first-degree murder charge based on rape or extreme cruelty or atrocity could be made. Desha elaborated that the three criteria for murder in the first-degree, which had a mandatory death sentence, were absent in the case: deliberate malice aforethought; murder committed during the act of committing a crime punishable by death; and extreme atrocity or cruelty.¹³ He provided examples of the latter, such as torture or, as in a recent murder, the victim had been stabbed and slashed sixteen times.¹⁴ Desha continued there was no evidence that Wilder had been raped, or that it had been attempted, and asserted that, based on the available evidence, the territorial grand jury might not return an indictment for first-degree murder.

Desha was shortly removed as acting prosecutor at the insistence of Alva Steadman, president of Cooke Trust Co., and attorney Charles Hite, who both complained to Mayor Johnny Wilson about Desha’s handling of the case.¹⁵ Steadman managed Wilder’s financial affairs for Cooke Trust, while Hite was a close friend and neighbor of hers. His wife was the first person contacted by Wilder’s housekeeper after her body was found. Wilson soon replaced Desha by appointing Hite as the permanent public prosecutor, and a few weeks later Hite had the grand jury indict Majors and Palakiko on first-degree murder charges and later rape charges.¹⁶ At a territorial Supreme Court hearing in 1951, Desha testified that Steadman and Hite brought “pressure” on him to bring first-degree murder charges against Majors and Palakiko by each calling him several times at his home.¹⁷ His testimony was corroborated at the hearing by his wife, who said she answered a telephone call from Hite and called Desha to speak with him. At the same hearing, Hite denied calling Desha to discuss the charges against Majors and Palakiko, so clearly one of them was lying and had committed perjury.¹⁸

Desha also related at the hearing that, after Majors and Palakiko were captured, “The public clamor was for immediate indictment for first-degree murder and an immediate trial . . . I could feel that the community was all stirred up about this thing. A lot of people were practically crying for the old days of the West when they just strung up a horse thief.”¹⁹ He responded to a question from Justice Ingram Stainback at the hearing if he thought it was possible for Majors and Palakiko to get a fair trial:

My experience has been when a victim is either of an old kama‘aina family or is related by marriage to them or is a member of the Cousins Society [organization of descendants of the first missionaries to Hawai‘i] or is somebody high in the social strata, there is always a hullabaloo. She [Wilder] was connected with one of the oldest kama‘aina families.²⁰

For that reason, Desha stated he thought Majors and Palakiko would not get a fair trial.

Indictments and Trial

Following the intervention of Hite and Steadman, Majors and Palakiko were each shortly indicted on three counts of murder: murder committed while committing the crime of rape; murder committed while attempting to commit rape; and murder committed with extreme atrocity and cruelty.²¹ They were the first such indictments in the history of the territory. Each of those crimes carried a mandatory death sentence, but none of them required premeditation, which Desha maintained was not evident in the case.

Indicative of the racial significance of the Wilder killing, the day after her body was discovered, the directors of the Haole-led Honolulu Chamber of Commerce approved the offering of a reward of $1,500 for information resulting in the arrest and conviction of Wilder’s slayer.²² At the chamber meeting, Steadman, who was appointed by the chamber president Lorrin P. Thurston as chair of a committee “to probe every phase of Honolulu’s worsening crime situation,” related that the killing of Wilder “agitated me more than any other occurrence since the Fukunaga kidnapping.”²³ Steadman was the judge in the 1928 murder trial of Myles Fukunaga, a nineteen-year-old Nisei, for kidnapping and bludgeoning to death a ten-year-old Punahou School student, Gill Jamieson, for which he was hanged the following year, despite his likely legal insanity. Steadman declared that the Wilder murder was the “top crime here in the last 25 years and is now an emergency which involves neither rich nor poor, white nor black,”²⁴ although rich Haoles like himself and the victim were very likely more concerned about the killing than non-Haoles were. Revealing his foremost desire, and probably that of many Haoles, that the killer of Wilder be charged with first-degree murder and executed, Steadman argued, “The one important thing is that we catch this criminal and hang him for murder.”²⁵ It was the same feeling that most Haoles had after Jamieson’s body was discovered two days after he was kidnapped in 1928.²⁶

Majors and Palakiko went on trial for first-degree murder in June 1948. The primary evidence against them included four confessions by them—one by Palakiko and three by Majors, in the second of which he admitted raping Wilder.²⁷ The first two of the statements by Majors were unsigned, and police detectives conceded at the trial that he was not shown those transcribed statements. Despite the objections of their court-appointed defense attorneys—T. S. Goo, George Kobayashi and Bert Kobayashi (no relation to each other)—all four confessions were read into evidence by the prosecuting attorney, Allan Hawkins, at the trial.²⁸ According to the statement by Pala kiko, after beating Wilder unconscious with their fists, they tied her up in her bedroom, and he went to the kitchen to get some food. When he returned, he told the police that Majors was raping her and, when Pala kiko told him they should leave, Majors replied, “You go.”²⁹ Pala kiko said he then went “to the stream and waited about 10 minutes for Majors to join [him].”³⁰ While in Majors’s unsigned second statement he admitted raping Wilder, he denied doing so in his first and third statements. The admission into evidence of the confessions of Majors and Palakiko would be the primary basis of subsequent appeals of their convictions.

After a six day trial with Judge Carrick Buck presiding,³¹ Majors and Palakiko were each convicted of three counts of first-degree murder after the jury deliberated for four-and-a-half hours. While the jurors found Majors guilty of first-degree murder on their first ballot, it took them seven votes before they came to a unanimous verdict regarding Palakiko,³² perhaps because no evidence was introduced that he had committed or had attempted to commit rape. In an interview forty years later, one of the jurors, Floyd Hustace, recalled, “We knew they were guilty. But I was for some kind of leniency. I didn’t really think it was a cut and dried situation, like premeditated murder . . . She suffocated. They didn’t expect her to die. Maybe it would have been different if it had been someone else. Wilder was a big name.”³³ It was a big name because she was related to a wealthy Haole family. After Judge Buck denied a motion for a new trial, she sentenced Majors and Palakiko to be hanged the next month.

Legal and Community Appeals

During the following three years until 1951, the attorneys for Majors and Palakiko appealed their convictions unsuccessfully to the territorial Supreme Court and the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. In May 1950, the Hawai‘i Supreme Court upheld the lower court verdict and denied them a new trial. The court responded to the defense argument that the confessions of the two men had been admitted improperly as evidence by contending they were “voluntarily made without the slightest indication of force, threat, duress or promise of reward or immunity and are therefore clearly admissible.”³⁴ The reason the Hawai‘i Supreme Court did not hear Majors’s and Palakiko’s appeal for almost two years after their convictions in June 1948 was the long delay by President Harry S. Truman to fill a vacancy in the three-member Supreme Court created by the death of Justice Albert Cristy. The appeal to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals was similarly unsuccessful with the court ruling in August 1951 that “none of the confessions were obtained by ‘lawless means’ and there was no ‘fundamental unfairness’ in using them against Majors and Palakiko.”³⁵

Hence on September 6, 1951, Governor Oren E. Long announced that he would invoke the death penalty against Majors and Palakiko, and their execution was scheduled for one week later at eight a.m.³⁶ But as Long later told the press, during that week he came under “terrific pressure” from both those in favor of the hanging and those who were opposed, and he decided to stay their execution for a week, just fifteen minutes before they would have been hanged. During that week, Long received numerous appeals, including a deluge of telephone calls and telegrams, to commute the sentences of the two men to life imprisonment. Nonetheless, the day before issuing his reprieve, Long claimed that “no organized drive” had developed for him to reduce their sentences and that he had received only one letter and a few telephone calls.³⁷

In fact, an organized campaign had emerged among the ILWU, Democratic Party leaders, Christian ministers, and Native Hawaiians. Antonio Rania, president of ILWU Local 142, announced that the union would be sending petitions with ten thousand signatures to Long, which requested that he commute Majors’s and Palakiko’s death sentences to life in prison.³⁸ Two days before the scheduled hanging, Willie Crozier, a Native Hawaiian described by the press as a “left wing Democrat,” and Helen Kanahele, also a member of the Democratic Oahu County Committee, urged the governor to grant commutation on an ILWU radio news commentary program hosted by Bob McElrath.³⁹ Labor lawyer Harriet Bouslog, another member of the same committee, who would later become the lead attorney for Majors and Palakiko, presented Long with a petition asking for commutation with almost three thousand seven hundred signatures, in addition to an earlier one signed by more than six hundred persons.⁴⁰ She had initiated the petition campaign to request the governor to reduce the death penalties of the condemned men. In addition, Bouslog, whose law firm, Bouslog and Symonds, represented the ILWU, wrote a letter to the Honolulu Star-Bulletin in which she argued that the “air of hysteria stirred up by the press, at the time of their [Majors and Palakiko] trial, made a fair trial impossible.”⁴¹ She also encouraged everyone who felt the same as her to urge Long to reduce Majors’s and Palakiko’s death sentences to life behind bars. Furthermore, Bouslog read a message sent to President Truman requesting commutation on McElrath’s ILWU radio program, which had been written by Kanahele. It stated in part:

Thousands of citizens of Hawaii from all walks of life have signed petitions. In one short week, over 15,000 persons have pleaded with Governor Long in the interest of justice and humanity to commute these sentences. The people of Hawaii believe Governor Long’s refusal to commute to life imprisonment is rank injustice.⁴²

But Truman did not honor their request.

Also contributing to the commutation campaign, twenty-one Christian ministers sent a letter to Long that requested him to reduce the death penalties to life in prison. They cited their “firm conviction that capital punishment is contrary to Christian principles” and their obligation “to influence the people of our community to abolish the penalty of capital punishment.”⁴³ While the ministers represented several Protestant denominations, they included Native Hawaiians, Japanese Americans, Korean Americans, and Haoles, reflecting the multiracial scope of the commutation campaign. Long also received letters and radiogram messages from members of the Wilder family in Honolulu that expressed their opposition to a stay of execution granted by him the previous week. One message read, “Men as merciless as Palakiko and Majors deserve no mercy,”⁴⁴ with which many Haoles probably agreed.

On September 19, 1951, the night before the scheduled execution of Majors and Palakiko the next morning, their new attorney, Harriet Bouslog, filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus in federal court in Honolulu.⁴⁵ In a packed courtroom “electric with suspense,” Judge J. Frank McLaughlin quickly denied the petition because, as he told her, Bouslog had not exhausted all of the legal remedies for her clients in the territorial courts. So, she called Associate Justice Louis LeBaron of the Hawai‘i Supreme Court, who agreed to hear the petition in a session that lasted from midnight to four a.m. But he also dismissed the petition, ruling that Majors and Palakiko had received a fair trial; however, he stayed their execution for ninety days until the full Supreme Court could hear the case, which it did later in the year.⁴⁶ At 4:25 a.m., the warden at Oahu Prison received a written order signed by Justice LeBaron to cancel the hanging scheduled for eight that morning and shortly informed Majors and Palakiko they had received another very late reprieve.⁴⁷

Supreme Court Hearing Revelations

At the Hawai‘i Supreme Court hearing on the petition for a writ of habeas corpus in November and December 1951, both Majors and Palakiko took the stand in their defense, unlike at their trial, although the hearing was not to determine their guilt or innocence of first-degree murder. They were seeking to have their convictions reduced to second-degree murder or to be granted a new trial. Majors testified that, while he remembered signing his third statement to the police on March 24, 1948, he was not certain if he had made two earlier statements to them while he was in Queen’s Hospital, as a result of drinking iodine in a suicide attempt after being captured three days earlier.⁴⁸ He stated that, while in the hospital, most of the time he “felt dopey and drowsy” because of a sedative given him as a painkiller; nonetheless, he said police detective Vernal Stevens “seemed to be there all the time” and questioned him at his bedside. According to Majors, Stevens, who was Native Hawaiian, told him, “I might as well tell everything because I was going to die anyway. Another time he said when I got out of the hospital he would take me to the room. I knew he meant the room they always take you for bust you up.”⁴⁹ Bouslog later challenged the admissibility of Majors’s confessions because of such threats of violence and misrepresentations made to him. Majors added that he did not know he had made statements to the police while in the hospital until they were introduced at his trial and also denied he had raped Wilder. In addition, in a reference to the Fifth Amendment, he asserted that he did not know he had a right not to provide evidence against himself but said he did know “they bust you up and make you testify against yourself.”⁵⁰

Racial injustice is even more evident when Palakiko testified at the Hawai‘i Supreme Court hearing that he was beaten by detective Stevens on March 20, 1948 at the police station. He said Stevens came into the room where he was being held and asked, “‘You a tough guy, Pala kiko?’ [He] said no, [Stevens] let loose a short left hook. [Palakiko] ducked and ran into [Stevens’s] right hand.”⁵¹ Pala kiko continued that Stevens then punched him in the stomach, spun him around by his shirt and “kept hitting [him] in the guts. He said he was going to hit [him] again and then [Palakiko] said ‘all right I’ll talk.’”⁵² Until that point, Palakiko had denied going to Nu‘uanu after escaping from the prison work gang. He also stated that before Stevens beat him, another police detective, Jack King, punched him four times in the stomach.

Supporting her son’s contention that he was assaulted by the police, Palakiko’s mother, Alice Nahoi, testified at the Hawai‘i Supreme Court hearing that when she saw him at the cell block on March 22, two days after the assault, he was “all beaten up.”⁵³ She described her son’s face as “swollen and all black and blue” and said he could hardly open his eyes. Affirming her testimony was that of her daughter and Palakiko’s sister, Mary Palakiko Krusynski, who testified that Palakiko had cuts and bruises on his face that day and that he told her and her mother that Stevens had beat him so they could “get [him] to confess.”⁵⁴ In addition, an Oahu Prison guard, Joseph Gonsalves, stated at the Hawai‘i Supreme Court hearing that Palakiko “didn’t look so good” after being held in police custody for about eight hours on March 22.⁵⁵ Gonsalves testified that at 4:30 p.m. on March 20 he escorted Pala kiko from an Oahu Prison cell and that his prisoner was wearing a white shirt and had no cuts or bruises on the face before being taken to the police station for questioning. But his appearance had changed for the worse when he next saw him at 12:30 the next morning at the police station being dragged along by two detectives with his head down and no shirt. At the hearing, Palakiko said someone took his shirt from him after he used it to wipe blood from his face; Bouslog asserted that the police took Palakiko’s shirt because it had blood stains from his beating by Stevens.⁵⁶

At Majors’s and Palakiko’s murder trial in 1948, Stevens denied that he had punched Palakiko at the detective bureau and testified that he never struck or threatened Majors.⁵⁷ However, Frances Hughes, an acquaintance of Stevens, informed Bouslog that he told her in August 1951 that Palakiko had declined to talk until the detective struck him “a couple of times.”⁵⁸ But the Hawai‘i Supreme Court would not allow Hughes to testify because her testimony would be hearsay evidence since Stevens was no longer living in Hawai‘i.⁵⁹ He was reported by his sister Napua Stevens Poire to be living in Oakland, California since September 1951, and both the prosecution and defense had attempted unsuccessfully to serve him with a subpoena to testify.⁶⁰

Another major issue raised by Bouslog at the Hawai‘i Supreme Court hearing was whether evidence showed that Therese Wilder had been raped.⁶¹ According to an autopsy report by the city and county coroner, Dr. Alvin Majoska, “there was no positive evidence of sexual attack.”⁶² The report was introduced as evidence at the hearing by the defense; however, it was not submitted by the prosecution at the murder trial. At that time, Majoska attributed the lack of evidence of rape as possibly due to the advanced state of decomposition of Wilder’s body. Also at the hearing, the city prosecutor, Allen Hawkins, testified about the contents of a missing FBI report of a chemical analysis of Wilder’s slip, which he said was “negative” for evidence of sexual assault.⁶³ He had been the assistant prosecutor at the murder trial, and at that time told the court he could not find the FBI report in his office but knew of its contents. However, the court would not permit the defense to question Hawkins about the report, but at the hearing he was allowed to testify after arguments by Bouslog, including that the disappearance of the report was “suspicious.”⁶⁴

After the month-long Hawai‘i Supreme Court hearing, in her two-hour closing argument Bouslog declared, “Poverty and ignorance become the tools to make it easy for public officials to rob those of their constitutional rights, who do not know they have them. Society will have the blood of these men on their hands if these procedures are sanctioned.”⁶⁵ She pronounced that detective Vernal Stevens’s testimony at the trial of Majors and Palakiko constituted perjury and that he had obtained the latter’s confession by beating him. Bouslog also maintained that the men were denied effective assistance of counsel at their trial, that the public feeling against them made a fair trial impossible, that the murder with extreme cruelty and atrocity section of the law was unconstitutional, and that the jury’s overall verdict of “guilty as charged” on all three counts was invalid because each count was different. Rather than address the latter issue, the deputy attorney general, Michiro Watanabe, argued that the question whether the confessions were involuntary was beyond the scope of habeas corpus proceedings.⁶⁶ The Hawai‘i Supreme Court agreed with the prosecution’s arguments and denied the petition. Dismissing it as a “devious and many-sided attack,” the court did not concur with the defendants’ contention that they were forced to confess to the murder—Palakiko after being beaten by Stevens and Majors out of fear of similar police brutality—and critically addressed each of the defense’s principal arguments.⁶⁷ The justices concluded, “On review of the entire record of hearing and trial, this court further finds that there was no force, violence, duress, threats, misrepresentations or promises made to obtain the confessions of either Palakiko or Majors.”⁶⁸ Bouslog and her colleagues then took their case to the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Further Legal and Community Appeals

Although it was filed the previous year, Majors’s and Palakiko’s appeal to the Ninth Circuit Court was not heard until October 1953. The appeal needed to concern constitutional issues to be within the court’s jurisdiction. So Bouslog argued that the “alleged” confessions by them were extracted by police coercion, that they were denied effective legal counsel at their trial, and that evidence of benefit to them was suppressed by the prosecution, particularly the FBI report that indicated Wilder had not been raped.⁶⁹ Territorial attorney general Edward Sylva countered that the validity of the confessions had been fully litigated in court, and therefore Majors and Palakiko were not entitled to a new trial.⁷⁰ The delay in hearing the appeal resulted from Bouslog being one of the attorneys in the six-month trial in 1953 of the “Hawaii Seven” for violating the Smith Act as alleged members of the Communist Party of Hawai‘i. This postponement and the previous delay in hearing Majors’s and Palakiko’s habeas corpus petition to the Hawai‘i Supreme Court may have contributed to their death sentences being commuted in 1954 because they provided the time for the campaign to save their lives to be organized and gain supporters. After their appeal to the Ninth Circuit Court failed, the attorneys for Majors and Palakiko requested that the U.S. Supreme Court review their case, but it declined in April 1954.⁷¹ In their petition to the Supreme Court, they repeated their earlier arguments and contended that the convictions of Majors and Palakiko were obtained solely through involuntary confessions by them; that an “atmosphere of hysteria” prevailed in Hawai‘i at the time of the trial, which denied the defendants due process of law; that the defendants were “hastily” brought to trial without permitting the initial defense attorneys sufficient time to prepare; and that the portion of the indictment which refers to murder committed with “extreme cruelty and atrocity” is unconstitutional because it is vague.⁷²

As for community appeals, following the Hawai‘i Supreme Court ruling in December 1951, Native Hawaiians began to organize a grass-roots campaign to save Majors and Palakiko from the gallows. The Palakiko and Majors Defense Committee, whose acting secretary was Helen Kanahele, was started in January 1952 to raise funds for their appeal to the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals—$2,250 to pay a court reporter to type up the record of court testimony—for which ads were placed in the local newspapers.⁷³ Kanahele also was chair of the Hawaiian Homesteaders Improvement Club, which adopted a resolution in May 1952 and sent it to Governor Long, that requested commutation of the death sentences of Palakiko, Majors and Liberado Joaquin (see below) and abolition of capital punishment in Hawai‘i.⁷⁴ After the U.S. Supreme Court decided not to hear the case, Kanahele announced that petitions to the governor, which requested that Majors and Palakiko be spared the death penalty, had been signed by thousands of their supporters and would be circulated in Hawaiian homestead communities, including Nānākuli, Waimānalo, and Papakōlea.⁷⁵

In a letter to the Star-Bulletin in February 1954, labor historian John Reinecke underscored the stark difference between the sentences given to the murderers of Joseph Kahahawai and to Majors and Palakiko.⁷⁶ He was responding to statements to a U.S. Senate committee by Ingram Stainback, who was an associate justice of the Hawai‘i Supreme Court during its habeas corpus hearing for Majors and Palakiko, that were printed in the newspaper.⁷⁷ Commenting on a pamphlet on the Massie-Kahahawai case written by Reinecke in 1951, Stainback remarked to the Senators, “I do not know whether you have ever seen the old pamphlet they got out in the Massey [sic] case showing that this was purely a matter of race prejudice that these people [Majors and Palakiko] were convicted.”⁷⁸ Stainback claimed that the pamphlet was distributed by the “Communist people down there [Hawai‘i]” in order “to raise race prejudice and attempt to bring into disrepute the courts of the Territory.”⁷⁹

In his letter to the Star-Bulletin, Reinecke countered that his “pamphlet does NOT say that Majors and Palakiko were convicted because of race prejudice” [emphasis in original] but, in its preface, he emphasized,

Thousands of people . . . had spontaneously compared the treatment of the murderers of Kahahawai (10 years sentence for manslaughter, commuted to one hour) with that of the sentences of the murderers of Mrs. Wilder (death sentence for first-degree murder, not commuted). The preface further points to the Massie-Kahahawai case as a striking example of the evil nature of race prejudice.⁸⁰

Reinecke was thus implying that racism was the principal factor that accounted for the huge difference in the sentences received by Kahahawai’s four Haole killers and those given to Majors and Palakiko, whose death sentences were ultimately commuted but to nothing like one hour. Further comparing the two cases, Reinecke, who was a contemporary observer, wrote in his preface, “The unpunished murder of Kahahawai left a deep impression upon the minds of Islanders. This was brought out sharply a few weeks ago when [the] two Hawaiian boys . . . faced execution.”⁸¹ After Governor Long first stayed their hanging in September 1951, Reinecke related that in the following week, “hundreds of petitions passed from hand to hand, calling upon the governor to save the young men’s lives . . . ‘What about the Kahahawai case?’ people asked as they signed the petitions.”⁸² As I argue below, local people still remembered what happened to Kahahawai almost twenty years later because he was lynched and became a martyr to racial injustice. In contrast, Majors and Palakiko and their case have faded from collective memory and Hawai‘i history because their lives were spared.

Another contemporary witness who compared the Massie-Kahahawai and Majors-Palakiko cases was community activist Ah Quon McElrath. Commenting first on the latter case, she remarked,

There was a recognition that something was wrong in the treatment of poor people, [which] was the death penalty for killing a White woman. If you were to contrast that with the Massie[-Kahahawai] case, which was the killing of a poor Hawaiian man by White people, and whose sole punishment was sitting in the governor’s office for one hour, . . . then you can understand why the Majors-Palakiko case is so important.⁸³

The case is very important because it constitutes continuation of what I have called “the trajectory of racial injustice in Hawai‘i.”⁸⁴ This trajectory is evident from the imprisonment in the 1920s of Japanese and Filipino plantation labor leaders based on perjured testimony, to the execution of Myles Fukunaga despite his likely legal insanity, to the freeing of the convicted murderers of Joseph Kahahawai, and to the convictions and death sentences given to Majors and Pala kiko based on their forced confessions.

Commutation by Governor King

In August 1954, after legal appeals on behalf of Majors and Pala kiko had been exhausted, Republican governor Samuel Wilder King (no relation to the victim) commuted their death sentences to life in prison with the possibility of parole.⁸⁵ King, who was Hapa Haole or of White and Hawaiian ancestry, had earlier granted the condemned men three stays of execution in the previous three months, the last reprieve for two weeks until August 15, in order to review their case.⁸⁶ By saving Majors and Palakiko from the gallows, King was continuing Republican initiatives to prevent Native Hawaiians from being executed as a way to maintain their support for Haole Republican candidates. Such Republican efforts for the benefit of condemned Kanaka had started in 1909 when Governor Walter Frear reduced the death penalty given to George Kaleikini to life behind bars.⁸⁷

In his commutation order, King stated that he commuted their death sentences because it was in the “best interests of the community.”⁸⁸ However, King’s decision was not well received by all members of the community. In an editorial, “There Is a Limit,” the Honolulu Advertiser (HA), the long-time voice of privileged Haoles and Republicans, declared,

Letters denouncing the commutation continue to be received in numbers….The verdict was that justice was thwarted by commutation of sentence of the two murderers, who killed an elderly, ailing woman. Public sentiment, however, has been fully expressed—in the strongest terms both in the mater [sic] of Palakiko and Majors and in the case of Jose Aloag, who received a ‘life’ term for the murder of five persons.⁸⁹

As a result, the paper informed its readers that it would not print any more letters regarding the two cases.

In an article on the Majors-Palakiko case written a year before their sentences were reduced to life imprisonment, long-time University of Hawai‘i sociologist Bernhard Hormann observed, “There are some people, Hawaiians as well as non-Hawaiians, who are convinced that no Hawaiian . . . will ever hang. This notion is . . . based on the implication that the Hawaiians can exert sufficient political pressure to prevent the hanging of persons of Hawaiian ancestry.”⁹⁰ This belief resulted from the political alliance that Haoles had established with Native Hawaiians in the early 1900s following annexation when Kanaka became the largest group by far of American citizens and hence voters and won almost three-fourths of the seats in the new territorial legislature.⁹¹ All of them belonged to the Home Rule Party, which was represented and supported primarily by Native Hawaiians and was openly anti-Haole. To address this problem, the dominant Haoles made a political compact with Kanaka in which the latter would vote for Haole Republican candidates and seek office as Republicans rather than as Home Rulers.⁹² In return, Haoles in power provided Native Hawaiians with patronage jobs in the new territorial and county governments, such as police officers, fire fighters, and clerical workers, and occasionally intervened on behalf of Kanaka who had committed homicide so they would not be hanged. This political alliance became increasingly more significant after World War II as the Democrats gained greater representation in the territorial legislature, which may have contributed to King’s decision to prevent Majors and Palakiko from being executed.

Very quickly after assuming office in late 1962, Democratic governor John A. Burns went further than King and substantially reduced the life sentences of Majors and Palakiko, which made them immediately eligible for parole.⁹³ They otherwise would have had to wait until July 1968 after spending the minimum twenty years behind bars before coming up for parole. In keeping with gubernatorial tradition in Hawai‘i of both the Democrats and Republicans, Burns granted parole to them just before Christmas 1962. He was harshly criticized for his decision, especially when Palakiko was returned to Oahu Prison in August 1963 for violating the terms of his parole. He was released after serving two more years in prison and died of cancer in 1974 at age forty-six. As for Majors, in the early 1980s he was said to be living in Fresno, California and, perhaps as a result, he appears to have disappeared from Hawai‘i history.⁹⁴

The other principal figure in the Majors-Palakiko case was their lead attorney, Harriet Bouslog, whose law firm received no financial compensation for its work on their behalf. Without the tireless intervention of Bouslog and her colleagues—Myer Symonds, Hyman Greenstein, and Delbert Metzger—Majors and Palakiko would very likely have been executed on September 20, 1951 before the Hawai‘i Supreme Court hearing, which revealed the severe injustices taken against them by the police and prosecution. Bouslog, who also was a steadfast advocate of workers’ rights, was interviewed in 1988 about her role in the Majors-Palakiko case nearly forty years after she first became involved in it by starting the petition campaign to have their death sentences commuted. Bouslog elaborated why she thought the two young Kanaka had been denied a fair trial and how justice was not equally dispensed to the rich and poor.⁹⁵ After learning that the article for which she had just been interviewed was tentatively titled “The Murder of Therese Wilder,” Bouslog, still defending her clients, replied, “It was never proven that the men murdered her. They were erroneously prosecuted. Evidence was suppressed. The police beat the confessions out of the men. I thought you wanted the truth.”⁹⁶ Those are among the critical facts or truth about the case that most people in Hawai‘i are unaware of, including the case itself.

The primary reason for this lack of knowledge about the Majors-Palakiko case is that, despite its obvious racial significance, not much academic work or journalistic writings has been produced about it over the past seventy years.⁹⁷ This circumstance may be attributed to the two men having escaped the gallows. Had they been executed, their case and their short lives would have been remembered, researched, and written about as blatant and tragic examples of racial injustice, much like what has transpired following the lynching of Joseph Kahaha wai and the execution of Myles Fukunaga since the 1930s. But the organized campaign to prevent the hanging of Majors and Palakiko clearly contributed to ending capital punishment in Hawai‘i, although it was not the only factor. The same groups that advocated commutation of their death sentences—Democratic Party leaders, the ILWU, Native Hawaiians, and Christian ministers—also later supported abolition of the death penalty in a multiracial coalition. While the Majors-Palakiko case has largely been forgotten, its lasting legacy, although not necessarily direct outcome, is that the state of Hawai‘i, unlike thirty other states and the U.S. government, does not execute people. But executions were stopped more than a decade before they were prohibited by law.

De Facto End of the Death Penalty

After the last hanging in 1944, the people of Hawai‘i, including jurors, prosecutors, and Haole judges and governors, appear to have greatly changed their attitudes and actions toward capital punishment, which led to its initial de facto and subsequent de jure abolition in 1957. These momentous changes are evident starting in 1947 when Democratic Governor Ingram Stainback commuted the death sentences of two Filipino convicted murderers—Juan Carpio, aged forty-five, and Manuel Adiate, who had killed his wife—to life behind bars.⁹⁸ Carpio was convicted of stabbing to death twenty-four-year-old Ellen Lau Troudt, a taxi dancer and mother of three children, four years earlier because she had refused his romantic advances. In 1949, Bonifacio Mamuad, a forty-one-year-old Filipino plantation laborer, who was initially charged with first-degree murder, was allowed to plead guilty to second-degree murder, an option that was less available to Filipinos before World War II.⁹⁹ He had killed an eighteen-year-old Filipino high school student almost a year earlier by stabbing her eighty-six times with a seven inch pair of scissors. In his confession, Mamuad told police that he planned to kill her after she told him she did not want anything to do with him when he sought a relationship with her, a frequent and tragic example of unrequited love among Filipino men because of the much greater number of them than Filipino women in Hawai‘i.¹⁰⁰

In another case involving a Filipino, in 1953 yard worker Antonio Alponte, aged fifty-one, was convicted by a jury of second-degree murder, despite being prosecuted for murder in the first-degree, for shooting to death without provocation three Filipino men at a party in Waikane the previous year.¹⁰¹ Instead of being hanged, he was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole. The day before the killings, Alponte had argued with Teodoro Lagapa after Alponte made a pass at Lagapa’s step-daughter.¹⁰² Alponte testified in his defense that the next day he drank some wine and took a .45 calibre Army pistol with him when he went uninvited to Lagapa’s house where a baptismal celebration was being held. He had earlier told the police that he went to the party with the intention of killing Lagapa because he was angry after Lagapa rejected Alponte’s request to marry his step-daughter.¹⁰³ After quarreling with Lagapa’s wife, Alponte slapped an elderly Filipino and, after a young man tried to calm him, he took his gun out and fired, killing the older and younger man and another Filipino, who appeared to be an innocent victim of Alponte’s anger.¹⁰⁴ In his testimony, Alponte claimed that he did not intend to harm anyone when he took the pistol with him to Lagapa’s home, and the jury apparently believed him, rather than the witnesses who testified against him.¹⁰⁵

Also in 1953, Reid Leota, a twenty-one-year-old Samoan, was allowed by Judge Carrick Buck and the prosecutor to plead guilty to second-degree murder after being initially charged with first-degree murder.¹⁰⁶ He and his brother, Alema Leota, aged twenty-three, were first charged with murder in the first-degree for beating to death a thirty-nine-year-old African American, Charles L. Nelson, the previous year.¹⁰⁷ From the Mormon community in Lā‘ie, the Hawai‘i-born Leotas were charged with murder committed with extreme atrocity and cruelty for striking Nelson, a naval shipyard worker, on the head with pool cues, assaulting him with their fists, and kicking and stomping him to death. Reid Leota was accused of jumping on Nelson’s chest several times as he lay unconscious in the street outside a downtown Honolulu pool hall, which an autopsy determined resulted in Nelson’s death from a ruptured heart, in addition to his numerous broken ribs and fractured skull.¹⁰⁸ According to the police, Nelson and two friends were playing pool when the Leota brothers entered the establishment, and one of them started a fight with one of Nelson’s friends. The grand jury decided there was insufficient evidence to indict Alema Leota for first-degree murder, so he was charged with assault and battery with a dangerous weapon for striking Nelson on the head with a cue stick.

Yet again in 1953, Governor Oren E. Long reduced the death penalty given to Liberado Joaquin, a fifty-two-year-old Filipino theatre attendant, to life imprisonment for stabbing to death his Haole girlfriend, Sally Anderson, in 1947.¹⁰⁹ In yet another sad case of unre-turned love, Joaquin pursued Anderson, a thirty-year-old taxi dancer, for a year and a half, during which he spent his entire life savings of more than $8,000 on her for a new car, jewelry, clothing, and even an appendectomy. At his trial, he testified that he stabbed her (sixteen times according to the autopsy) while in a rage after she told him their relationship was over and she was not going to marry him, despite having promised she would.¹¹⁰ Between sobs in his breaking voice, the diminutive Joaquin continued that Anderson “slapped [his] face and called [him] names. Then [he] stabbed until [he] didn’t know what happened. [He] went crazy!”¹¹¹ However, a few days before he killed her, he wrote a suicide note to his brother, stating, “This is the only way I can make her even,” which the prosecutor argued was an indication of his intent to kill Anderson and then himself after Joaquin learned she was still married.¹¹² Long was reported to have decided to commute Joaquin’s death sentence based upon the strong recommendation from Judge Carrick Buck, who presided over his trial.¹¹³ In her letter urging commutation, the judge remarked that, in her almost eighteen years on the bench, she had rarely disagreed with a jury verdict, but she felt “very strongly that in this case the verdict of murder in the first-degree was not a truly just verdict.”¹¹⁴ Prior to the war, many of the twenty-four executed Filipinos were likely hanged because of such unjust verdicts.¹¹⁵

Another Filipino saved from the gallows was Jose Aloag, aged forty-eight, who was found guilty by a jury in 1954 of second-degree murder, despite being prosecuted for murder in the first-degree, for brutally killing two years earlier five members of a Japanese American family he worked for as a farmhand.¹¹⁶ In what was the worst mass murder in Hawai‘i history, Aloag used a ten-inch bayonet to stab to death thirty-eight-year-old Richard Sumida, his thirty-year-old wife and three of their children aged nine, seven, and four at their farm in Maunalua Valley, O‘ahu. Described as “one of the most ruthless cases of wanton butchery,” the victims’ bodies bore eighty-three stab and slash wounds, including twenty-eight on the father and fourteen on the four-year-old daughter, and three of the deceased were stabbed in the heart.¹¹⁷ When arrested, Aloag told police that he killed the Sumida family because the previous evening Richard Sumida had paid a $20 car repair bill for him, and he suspected it was a way that his employer was going to keep him in “bondage” by making deductions from his wages for paying the bill.¹¹⁸ Aloag related that he spent the evening drinking in downtown Honolulu, brooding about the bill payment, and killed the Sumidas shortly after returning to the farm after midnight. Perhaps because of this evidence of premeditation, the number of victims, and the vicious manner in which they were killed, the jury verdict was harshly criticized by the public.¹¹⁹

While they committed their crimes and were convicted of first-degree murder in 1948, Majors and Palakiko were granted executive clemency by Governor King in 1954 after thousands of Hawai‘i’s people signed petitions requesting that their lives be spared. Thus, during the previous decade since the last execution in 1944, the death penalty had effectively come to an end through the active intervention of government officials and island residents—as jurors in the Alponte and Aloag cases, and as petitioners and contributors in the Majors-Palakiko case. The next logical step would be to eliminate the death sentence by law, but first the Republicans had to be ousted from their power and control of the legislature for the past fifty years.

Abolition of Capital Punishment

Elsewhere, I have argued that race, as the foremost organizing principle of social relations in Hawai‘i and as deployed by Haoles, resulted in only one Haole being hanged during the territorial period, while the other forty-one persons put to death were all non-Haoles.¹²⁰ Besides playing a major role in issuing the death sentence, race also figured prominently in its elimination in Hawai‘i. After gaining control of both houses of the territorial legislature for the first time in the November 1954 elections, the Democrats immediately introduced bills to end capital punishment during the following year’s legislative session in the House of Representatives and Senate.¹²¹ They were fully aware that the death penalty had been applied overwhelmingly against non-Haoles, their principal supporters over the decades. Submitted by Manuel Henriques, a Portuguese Democrat from Kaua‘i, the House bill proposed to make the crimes of first-degree murder, first-degree arson, rape, “train wrecking,” and espionage during wartime or rebellion punishable by life terms at hard labor instead of by death.¹²² In the Senate, three bills were introduced by another Portuguese Democrat, John Duarte from Maui, to abolish the death sentence for first-degree murder, rape, and the intentional burning of occupied houses at night.¹²³ The House passed its bill by a twenty-three to seven margin with only Republicans voting against it.¹²⁴ Hebden Porteus, the Republican House floor leader, led the opposition against the bill by asserting, “There are some murderers who should be hanged. I’m against capital punishment in most instances but not necessarily all.”¹²⁵ Supporters of the bill, including Christian ministers who gave testimony at the legislature, advanced religious and moral reasons for their opposing the death penalty, including that it “puts society in the role of assuming power of the Lord over human life.”¹²⁶

The House version of the bill, which would have abolished capital punishment entirely, was amended and passed in the Senate and signed into law by Governor King in 1955.¹²⁷ The new act eliminated the death sentence for first-degree arson, rape, and train wrecking and gave the jury the right to sentence first-degree convicted murderers either to death or life in prison without parole. However, by replacing the entire section on capital punishment in the previous law, the act did not specify how executions should be conducted and thus may have inadvertently ended the death penalty.¹²⁸

After retaining control of the legislature in the 1956 elections, the Democrats sought once again to abolish capital punishment during the following year’s legislative session. In the House, the bill providing for abolition was notably introduced by four future major leaders of the party—George Ariyoshi, Dan Inouye, Spark Matsunaga, and Patsy Takemoto Mink.¹²⁹ Easily passing the House by a twenty to seven margin of the thirty members, with only Republicans voting against it, the bill also encountered Republican opposition in the Senate, including a two-hour filibuster, only the third in the Senate’s history, by Wilfred Tsukiyama.¹³⁰ Also Japanese American like the bill’s sponsors, Tsukiyama contended that the current law, which let a jury decide if a convicted murderer should be hanged, is a “good law” and that those opposed to the death sentence “have not considered the people who have suffered.”¹³¹ Two years later, Matsunaga provided the reasons for his opposition to executions in response to an effort by the police chiefs of the four counties of Hawai‘i to restore the death penalty. He argued statistics establish that capital punishment does not deter crimes punishable by death and, “It’s not the prerogative of a man to take another man’s life.”¹³² Despite the Republican filibuster, the bill to terminate the death sentence prevailed in the Senate by an eleven to four vote with two Democrats, including Senate president William Heen, joining its Republican opponents.¹³³ While serving as Hawai‘i’s nonvoting delegate to Congress in 1957, Democratic Party leader John A. Burns supported passage of the bill. He remarked several years later that his experience as a Honolulu police officer led him to lend his assistance to ending executions.¹³⁴ Burns related that his opposition to capital punishment was based on his view that “reprisal is not the answer to the prevention of crime” and on his agreement with penologists and criminologists (and Matsunaga) that the death penalty is not a deterrent to murder.¹³⁵

The bill eliminating the death sentence was signed into law by Governor King in June 1957.¹³⁶ It abolished capital punishment by repealing the law that provided for the hanging of persons convicted of capital crimes, who instead would be sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. As a Republican, King did not usually approve legislation passed by the Democratic-majority legislature; he did not hesitate vetoing some seventy-one bills introduced by Democrats during the 1955 legislative session.¹³⁷ Those bills were generally intended to foster racial equality, social justice, and economic mobility after a half century of Haole Republican oppression of non-Haoles.¹³⁸

King’s son, former federal judge Samuel P. King, related that his father once shared with him his reasons for signing the abolition of capital punishment bill, which underscored the class and racial status of those who were hanged. The younger King said the older emphasized to him that “all the people who had been executed were without money or power” and that “they were nearly all Hawaiian or non-white.”¹³⁹ Having access to money and power certainly explains how the Haole killers of Joseph Kahahawai and of other non-Haoles were able to escape the gallows and, in some cases, any punishment for their crimes. In contrast, poor Native Hawaiian, Filipino, Japanese, Korean, and Puerto Rican accused murderers had no option except court-appointed attorneys to defend them, in most cases unsuccessfully. The racial disparity noted by the elder King among those hanged was certainly the case, although only one Kanaka was executed, the same as the number of Haoles, during the territorial period.

Following the example of King, his successor, Republican governor William F. Quinn in 1958 commuted the death sentence of Native Hawaiian Joseph Josiah to life in prison after the Hawai‘i Supreme Court denied his appeal to set aside his 1954 conviction for first-degree murder.¹⁴⁰ Josiah was found guilty of killing the payroll manager of a trucking company they both worked for during a robbery. Quinn’s commutation decision was likely based more on political than legal considerations—to maintain Kanaka support for the Republican Party—because executions had been eliminated the year before.

When Hawai‘i abolished capital punishment, it was still a territory and joined only six states—Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, North Dakota, Rhode Island and Wisconsin—and the commonwealth of Puerto Rico in doing so.¹⁴¹ Those states, with the exception of Michigan, were overwhelmingly White, so racial difference in the application of the death penalty probably was not a major consideration when they prohibited it. In Hawai‘i, as a racially progressive measure, ending executions was one of many other such actions initiated by the Democrats after winning control of the legislature (both territorial and state) and the office of the governor. Those actions include raising the minimum wage, providing more funds for the public schools and for social services, establishing a graduated income tax schedule, and increasing unemployment benefits.¹⁴² Such laws and policies were intended to benefit primarily non-Haoles after decades of Haole oligarchical domination following annexation that severely restricted opportunities in employment, education, and justice for non-Haoles and maintained the racial status quo of inequality and hierarchy.¹⁴³ It also needs to be emphasized that termination of the death sentence in Hawai‘i occurred during the 1950s, a politically and culturally conservative period in American history, especially in contrast to the dramatic social changes that emerged during the subsequent decade. Abolition of capital punishment and the other progressive laws and policies enacted by the Democrats transpired primarily because of the political and racial context in Hawai‘i and not in continental America, particularly the Democratic takeover of the legislature. Without the latter, while it was possible for condemned murderers to have their death sentence commuted by Republican governors, as with Majors and Palakiko, executions still could be conducted.

Two decades after abolition, some Democrats changed their view of the death penalty. Led by state senator Duke Kawasaki, in 1976 and 1977 the Democratic-majority Senate twice passed bills that would have re-established capital punishment, but they were defeated in the House, also controlled by the Democrats.¹⁴⁴ More than twenty years later, Kawasaki explained his position:

When I worked for reinstatement, I made sure there were strict requirements. I was especially concerned about contract killings and premeditated murder. These guys who kill in cold blood—there’s no way to rehabilitate them, no way. And a lot of my colleagues agreed. We got the bill through the Senate twice, and each time the House screwed it up.¹⁴⁵

Kawasaki’s efforts to restore the death sentence may have been motivated by the 1970 shooting death of his close friend, state senator Larry Kuriyama, by “underworld hit man” Ronald Ching.¹⁴⁶ In a plea agreement in 1984, Ching confessed to the Kuriyama murder, as well as three others, but was believed to have been involved in several other contract killings.

Conclusion: Race and Abolition of the Death Sentence

The dramatic changes in attitudes and actions toward capital punishment, which culminated in its elimination, may have resulted from the vastly transformed racial setting in Hawai‘i after World War II. This restructuring was initiated by the ILWU in its organizing of sugar, pineapple, and dock workers, who were predominantly non-Haole. With its membership of 35,000 workers by 1947,¹⁴⁷ the union had the organizational strength, resources, and commitment to challenge the Haole-led Big Five companies that had dominated the island economy since the second half of the nineteenth century. This newly developed racialized power was concretely demonstrated by the ILWU in its unprecedented victory in the 1946 sugar strike, the first multiracial strike in Hawai‘i history, which brought together Filipino, Japanese, and Portuguese workers. Besides interracial unity, another major accomplishment from the strike was a ban on racial discrimination against plantation employees, which was formalized in their new contract with the Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association, eighteen years before Congress passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act.¹⁴⁸ A series of ILWU-led strikes in longshore, pineapple, and sugar ensued in the late 1940s and 1950s as the union and implicitly non-Haoles informed Haoles that island race relations had been changed forever and their decades of settler oligarchical rule were over.

Also occurring at the same time in post-war Hawai‘i but at a slower pace was the coming to political power in 1954 of the Democratic Party, which was supported primarily by non-Haoles but had significant Haole leadership, notably John Burns, Tom Gill, and Harriet Bouslog.¹⁴⁹ Democratic electoral victories were furthered by ILWU endorsements, financial contributions, campaign assistance, and votes.¹⁵⁰ Both the party and the union shared dominant goals of fostering racial equality and unity in island society and collaborated together to attain them, albeit not always.¹⁵¹ Their joint and separate efforts resulted in the wholesale transformation of race relations between Haoles and non-Haoles, which made ending executions possible.

Since non-Haoles were overwhelmingly those put to death, often as victims of racial injustice, the Democratic Party and the ILWU, together with their primarily non-Haole supporters and members, and others, such as Christian clergy, led the campaign to abolish capital punishment. While there may have been previous efforts before the war, the abolition movement began especially with the broad initiative to save Majors and Palakiko from hanging. In addition to being multisectoral, that campaign was multiracial, bringing together Filipinos, Japanese, Native Hawaiians, and Portuguese in the ILWU and Democratic Party, Native Hawaiian homesteaders, and Haoles among Christian ministers and their parishioners, and among Democratic Party leaders and supporters. Those same racial and ethnic groups advocated ending the death penalty once bills were introduced in the territorial legislature by the Democrats in 1955. Thus, as argued above, the continuing legacy of the Majors-Palakiko case is abolition of capital punishment in Hawai‘i, but it could not have happened without the Democratic takeover of the legislature, given strong Republican advocacy for sending people to their death.